Poker is a game of skill with a large number of variations, including variations in the structure and format of the game play, player actions (e.g., betting, discarding and drawing new cards), and the determination of gaming outcomes (e.g., best hand among players who have not folded their hands wins, fixed schedule of payouts depending on hand). In general, poker games use a hierarchy of poker hands to compare player hands and to determine a winner (or winners in the case of multiple players having the same poker hand). One variation of poker is five-card draw, which itself has several variations. In general, five-card draw poker games involve dealing each player an initial hand of five cards, permitting each player to discard some or all of the cards in his/her initial hand, and then replacing the discards with newly drawn cards from the deck. Five-card draw poker gaming outcomes can be determined, for example, by evaluating the final poker hands for each player who has not folded by the time all gaming action (e.g., discards and drawing new cards, betting rounds) has been concluded and identifying a best poker hand (according to poker hand rankings, which range from a royal flush to a high card). Five-card draw poker gaming outcomes can also be determined by evaluating each player's resulting poker hand in isolation against one or more payout tables (instead of comparing player poker hands), such as tables that correlate particular poker hands to varying payout amounts/odds based on a bet amount.
Electronic gaming systems and equipment have borrowed the hierarchy of poker hands and assigned values to each of the hands to provide electronic gaming whereby players attempt to make poker hands with the greatest value and corresponding payout. Electronic gaming systems and equipment have been designed, for example, to provide a variation on five-card draw poker in which poker gaming equipment typically deal a player five cards and allow the player to discard anywhere from zero to all five of the cards in the initial hand. These electronic gaming systems then replace each of the discarded cards with additionally “drawn” card(s) and determine the outcome of the game (e.g., whether the player won and the odds that apply to the win) based on the final resulting hand as it is compared to the values assigned to the hierarchy of poker hands for the game.